Letter

The psychiatric shock treatment

Dear healthmatters - Mary Bell’s ambivalence about her mother’s ECT (Going through shock, issue 9) mirrors confusion and contention more generally in mental health debates about this emotive treatment.

The recent campaign by the Royal College of Psychiatrists to sell their wares to a ‘clinical iceberg’ of 3 million untreated depressives has included material which sings the praises of ECT (see Colin Brewer in The Guardian, 29 January 1992). For their part many radical service users still call for its abolition. How can these positions be reconciled?

Recent data collected for national MIND by myself and colleagues point to two relevant conclusions. First, users report both profound gratitude and abhorrence for ECT - it tends to produced polarised responses in its recipients. Second, psychiatrists are disingenuous in their claims that they are careful to apply the

treatment to a narrow band of severely depressed patients.

Half of our sample of 516 patients with at least one psychiatric admission reported receiving ECT. It is not apparently a carefully targeted treatment. Moreover, despite claims to the contrary from psychiatrists, patients do report concerns about memory loss following treatment, which they find distressing.

While angry users may risk throwing the baby out with the bath water in calling for the abolition of ECT, smug psychiatrists help no one by abusing its application and by failing to address the understandable fear and revulsion which some users experience when faced with the treatment.

My personal view is that major tranquillisers are a mush greater iatrogenic threat to service users than ECT - but I’ve been lucky enough to evade both treatments to date.